But women are breaking through in the very place where their numbers will not only make gender parity a reality in the next 10 years, but where the breeding grounds of gender dominance are all pointing in the same direction.

But they’re also making major inroads into traditionally ‘male’ subjects like architecture, business, dentistry and veterinary science.

In the undergraduate cohort of students in the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine Program at the Ontario Veterinary College in Guelph Ontario, 83 women and 18 men enrolled in 2015, and in the graduate program there are 14 women and three men.

In dentistry, it won’t be long before half the country’s dentists are women because gender parity at Canada’s dentistry programs has been a fact for some years now.

But it’s in that ultimate male stronghold of business programs where some surprising shifts are happening. We can see this first in the number of women worldwide who take the business school admission test. According to the Graduate Management Admissions Council, that number rose by 38 per cent in the decade between 2006 and 2015. This is more than triple the rise for male test-takers.

As of 2013, men still outpaced women by 64 per cent to 36 per cent among MBA degree holders, but that same year, as many women as men earned specialty degrees.

A major tipping point was reached this past year when the undergraduate commerce program at the Rotman School of Business at the U of T admitted a 52% female first-year class. While Rotman’s graduate MBA graduation class is 32 per cent female, Laurentian’s MBA in Thunder Bay is 60 per cent female. Women have made up more than 40 per cent of Harvard Business School students for some years now.

But do big numbers translate into real power?

When it comes to gender parity no, not yet. But I’m confident it will.